Kiss of the Soulless
by Silver Sailor Ganymede
Summary: Oneshot. A Death Eater recieves the Dementor's kiss.


Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Kiss of the Soulless  
By Silver Sailor Ganymede

You hate the darkness. At one point it was your mistress, your sanctuary, but now it is nothing more than an oppressing abyss misery in which you were imprisoned. The darkness veils your eyes so that you cannot see, much in the same way he, the master of the darkness, did when you were still free.

You feel the biting cold gnaw into your bones but you do not pay heed to it, not now; there is a worse cold in the air here, the chill of the cloaked demons, the souless ones, your guards: the Dementors.

You close your eyes; even this seems light compared to the darkness when your eyes are open. Oh now you have your eyes open, now you can see what you have done wrong even if you cannot see anything else. You were wrong to follow him, you know that now; they've shown you everything that you've done wrong, of course they have, and they show you the worst memories of your life. That is the punishment of those entombed in Azkaban.

They have shown you your wrongs, yet the ministry will not set you free. You hate them even more now than you did before, even as the last of your sanity threatens to ebb away. You hate them for their policies, ideals that threaten the very existence of your world, but most of all you hate them for their hypocrisy. Of course he was a hypocrite too – but not to the extent that the ministry are. They preach that he is evil and that you and all the others are evil, all because of what you believe. You don't deny that you did wrong, and that his intentions were misguided, but since when have the ministry been in a position to say such things? After all, isn't locking others up under the guardianship of the most heinous of dark creatures and driving them to insanity for nothing more than their beliefs as much of a crime as what you and your fellows had done? Surely it was, but of course they did not see it that way, if indeed they saw anything at all.

The darkness of your eyes goes from its usual dullish grey to a haunting shade of blood red. Light has been brought into Azkaban, into your cell; that can only mean one thing… soon you will be worse than dead. Calloused hands grab at your fragile bones, bruising your weakened body and tearing your already ruined robes. They haul you to your feet as you open your eyes. They are still human, though indeed they are monsters in human guise, these minions of the ministry come to deliver unto you a fate that you supposedly deserve.

The door of your cell is slammed shut behind you as they drag you to your fate. You hear frenzied screaming, animalistic shrieks, and wonder where they are coming from. Then you realise that your throat is raw and bleeding and it is your own voice you can here. One of your final captors backhands you across the face to quieten you but you do not feel it. You cannot feel anything anymore, nothing except the cold that they have embedded into your soul.

You find yourself blinded as you come to a room. It is filled with light and no matter how dim it must seem to them to you it is the light both of paradise and of hell. This is the last light that you will ever see. They push you down into the chair in the room's centre and you can tell that they are surprised by how little you are resisting them. Chains coil up your arms and bind you in much the same way the snake that you served once did. You cannot move now and you will never consciously move again but you do not care; perhaps you deserve this fate after all, it would have been yours to take no matter who won.

Then you see it, the lone Dementor in with its robes of skin and rotted, corpse like flesh for skin. Its gnarled hand reaches out and touches you; normally such a thing would have repulsed you but you cannot be any more: you cannot feel at all. It lowers its hooded face to you and for the first and only time you see the features of a Dementor. Then it turns into head and locks it's gaping mouth to your own. You had expected to taste rotting flesh and feel excruciating pain as it took your soul, but you met none of these things; you simply saw every wrong doing in your life flash before your eyes, every minor mistake becoming a great catastrophe. Then you realised: they were wrong, the Dementor did not take people's souls, it twisted their memories and feelings so much that they were locked inside themselves. There was no way to escape from this fate…

You fall away and now you can see nothing, only your memories repeating themselves over and over. Somewhere in the distance, so faint you almost think it isn't real, you hear a voice.

"The prisoner successfully received the Dementor's kiss, the case is finally closed."

"Severus Snape may have been cold, but I never expected him to put up that face infront of a Dementor," came another voice. "It's almost as if he could never feel at all."

"Well he'll never feel again at any rate," came the reply.

Inside your head you know that whoever spoke was right; you will never feel again, never. But who was Severus Snape?

In your insanity even your own name has escaped you.


End file.
